Beyond the Tool: Using Custom Data Reports from SEMrush

SEMrush is known first and foremost as a tool provider. But there’s more to our story.

Behind the tool lies far more data about keywords and their corresponding metrics than any of our competitors track or monitor. Many opportunities — which take advantage of custom reports we generate from this massive dataset — are under-utilized. A small number of brands and agencies “think beyond the tool,” working with our account management team to develop profitable strategies for their websites.

For example, SEMrush clients with large websites monetized by advertising or sponsorship have great success correlating large datasets of AdWords buyers with prospective customers. An ideal SEMrush dataset here is the top 10,000 AdWords buyers by budget for the most recent month, as well as for three and six months ago.

Two example metrics to look for are a high AdWords budget and increasing budget trend over time. The domain names of businesses with large budgets and budget increases for AdWords are matched with those that have membership business accounts on the client’s website. The prospects are targeted through their membership accounts with generous promotions for advertising inventory or sponsorship opportunities.

If a social network or content website has 50,000 business membership accounts there may be an overlap where 1,000 of them are particularly qualified by their AdWords buying behavior. Many of these overlapping accounts may be large corporations that the website fully expects to appear on a list of top 10,000 AdWords buyers. However, if the website were to manually match the large corporations to include in a selective promo, it would waste countless hours.

The many small and medium-sized businesses found with significant AdWords budgets are far more likely to convert to regular advertising or sponsorship buyers than those with no AdWords budget. They would otherwise not be identified as terrific prospects. By pre-qualifying promotion recipients, the membership website can afford to make the offer far more substantial, assuring more of the businesses they want to participate do so, and later result in a higher conversion to regular paying customers.

Other useful custom reports with over 100,000 lines of data

• A “deep dive” into the organic keyword ranking for leaders in your industry will reveal a trend and help you develop your content strategy.

• Using a database or Excel, analyze AdWords spending trends over time for the leaders in your e-commerce sector. Choose companies with massive AdWords budgets that have been in place for years that you know are absolute pros with their online advertising (Amazon, for example). Compare key selling point phrases they use in product ads and look at text for over 300,000 purchased AdWords — you’ll see what works for them and can work for you.

• Look at the budget leaders in your industry, as with the above, for more than 300,000 PPC buys over the last 12 months. Analysis will help to determine the seasonal buying patterns they employ for AdWords.

Author bio:

Eric Van Buskirk is an SEMrush Senior Account Manager in North America. He is also the publisher of Tweet Philadelphia, a blog about the intersection of social and SEO. Feel free to reach out to Eric at (855) 814-4510, ext. 509 or by email at [email protected]